From Schelling to Hess: materiality, Judaism, and the logic of holy history

This article reexamines Moses Hess’s early work The Holy History of Mankind (1837) by situating it within the intellectual legacy of F.W.J. Schelling rather than the frameworks of Hegel or Spinoza. While scholarship has long emphasized Hess’s roles as socialist and proto-Zionist, this study argues that his first book reveals a distinct philosophical project rooted in Schelling’s middle-period metaphysics of the Real. Drawing on Schelling’s notions of Ground, contraction, and Will, the article shows how Hess develops a logic of history in which Judaism embodies an ideal of intuition and the unity of spirit and matter (religion and politics) that Christianity later abstracts and universalizes. Against Hegel’s depiction of Judaism as alienated and Spinoza’s critique of its particularism, Hess recasts Jewish material concreteness and its description as a religion of intuition as the indispensable foundations of historical progress and utopian renewal. His book thus offers a theological materialism in which the Real, rather than the Ideal, grounds the unfolding of divine history.